For those who are home, and for those who are on the way. For those who support the historic and just return of the land of Israel to its people, forever loyal to their inheritance, and its restoration.

Monday, November 30, 2015

...Notably, despite its frequent promotion of the theme of a stalled peace process (and related negation of Palestinian agency or responsibility on that issue), the BBC apparently did not think this was a story its audiences needed to know about in order to “enhance” their “awareness and understanding of international issues“.

Hadar Sela..
BBC Watch..
30 November '15..

Whilst the BBC’s preoccupation with the lack of diplomatic progress in negotiations to bring about an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict is by no means new, as the few examples below show, the stagnated peace process theme has frequently been used as context by BBC journalists reporting on the current wave of terror attacks against Israelis.

“Violence does not come out of the blue. It has a context. Once again, the problem is the unresolved conflict between Palestinians and Jews. It is at the heart of all the violence that shakes this city.” (Jeremy Bowen, BBC News website, 15/10/2015)“The current violence stems from decades of unresolved conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. At its most basic, it is a fight over land and national rights.[…]Peace talks aimed at ending the conflict by creating a Palestinian state alongside Israel have repeatedly collapsed over the years and many on both sides have lost faith in the process.” (BBC News website, 22/10/2015)“On the Palestinian side there is a persistent sense of resentment at continuing Israeli occupation which is intensified not just by the circumstances around the al-Aqsa compound but also by the widespread sense that the whole issue of the two-state solution has been allowed to drift off the international agenda.It is hard to remember a time when so little diplomatic effort was put into the search for a solution to the long-running issue between Israel and the Palestinians.” (Kevin Connolly, BBC News website, 5/10/2015)

One might therefore have expected to see some BBC reporting on a related story which broke earlier this month – as our colleagues at the CAMERA Snapshots blog have recorded.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

...We described last year a festive commemoration that took place when the decomposed body of the human bomb who exploded inside the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem was given to the PA. It's what death cults do. And no, it's not at all surprising that despite the very visible presence of Hamas flags and supporters, there's the high-profile involvement of senior PA figures. Arch-rivals they may be, but in their world everyone wants and expects to get a piece of the adulation of a certified martyr.

Green Hamas flags, Fatah/PA dignitaries and speech-makers, enthusiasticcrowds including lots of children: The festive May 2014 re-interment of the remains of the human bomb who exploded inside the Sbarro pizzeria. The backstory is here.

The focus is on the customary Israel-on-Arab outrages, as promoted by an entity called "Palestinian National Committee for Retrieving Bodies of Martyrs". Lip-service is paid by the writer to the cause of death of "the majority" of the Palestinian Arabs whose bodies are said to be held by Israel: in her rather colorless words, they "had killed or injured Israeli military and civilians in attacks". No hint here that these "attacks" were invariably terrorism, with the targets in most cases being civilians, including women and children. No need for anyone to be troubled by this aspect, according to Ma'an, since

"the actual involvement of others in attacks at the time of their death has been disputed by the United Nations and Amnesty International."

They presumably understand what they mean. To us, it sounds like more of what Ma'an is good at: liberal use of "alleged" when terrorism is being done to Israelis; the systematic casting of doubt on whether the attacks even happened, whether they were terrorism or "resistance", even whether the assailants had knives or whether the Israelis planted them next to the attackers' bodies. Not exactly a sophisticated approach. More a matter of heavy-handed agenda-based reporting.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

...AS the SJP demonstrates, BDS is a vile virus of hate that is as illogical as it is absurd. It must be opposed at every level. Those who fail to understand its malignant nature or treat its activities as acceptable conduct are granting it a legitimacy it doesn’t deserve.

Can there be anything more ludicrous than a movement that is dedicated to isolating the state of Israel than for its website to be built using a platform created by and operated from that same Jewish state? Not really. But that’s the situation the BDS — boycott, divest, sanction — movement finds itself in today as news spreads that once again one of its main organs is using the Israeli company Wix’s services to operate its website. That leaves Students for Justice in Palestine, which got caught doing this two years ago left trying to explain why its okay for them to make use of an Israeli product while trying to compel others to boycott them. But the contretemps over the decision of the SJP chapter at the University of Denver to repeat the actions of its Cornell University group two years ago once again gives us insight not only into the absurdity of Israel boycotts but the psychology of hate at its core. Their embarrassment, along with the growing number of incidents of hate speech associated with BDS and humiliating failures, should inform the decisions of those asked to join this movement as well as members of Congress as they ponder whether to include language prohibiting such boycotts in trade legislation.

The only word in the colloquial dictionary that adequately describes SJP’s excuses for using Wix is lame. BDS’ers work hard to convince the world that Israel should be treated as a pariah state and to refrain from all economic intercourse with it. Their purpose is to wage war on it and, by gradually tightening the economic noose, force its collapse. Yet SJP thinks its perfectly okay for them to avail themselves of the brilliant achievements of the “Start-Up Nation.” Like all those who wish to see Israel eliminated, but are not prepared to give up the benefits that come from employing the products it creates, including medical advances that save lives, BDS groups are forced into the humiliating position of saying that they can decide which kinds of economic interaction with Israelis is acceptable.

In its defense, the Denver chapter cited a statement issued by its Cornell counterpart in 2013 when it was caught doing the same thing. That absurd document says that it is wrong for anyone to think BDS is about an absolute ban on Israeli products or anti-Semitism. Here’s an excerpt:

Let us be clear: BDS is not abstention, nor an absolute moral principle. It is not isolation or withdrawal, and it does not entail a rejection of everything Israeli. It is not anti-Semitic, and it has nothing to do with the merits of Israeli technology. BDS is not the attempt of beautiful souls to avoid contamination with oppression and keep their own hands clean: it is a tactic within a larger strategy, and it is beginning to work.

In other words, they say that by using some Israeli products that proves they are not anti-Semitic. This is utterly illogical and speaks of nothing more than facile self interest. But as laughable as this attempt to explain the unexplainable might be, it’s worth noting two key facts about this kerfuffle.

One is that their claim that they can wage economic war on Israel without being anti-Semitic is a flat out lie. The purpose of BDS is not to change Israeli policies or to adjust its borders, positions that are legitimate, if often wrong-headed points of view about the conflict in the Middle East. Rather, its goal is to eradicate the Jewish state and to deny its people the right to self-defense, self-determination and sovereignty. Without these rights there is no possibility that Jews can live in safety as a free people in their ancient homeland. Israel is the one Jewish state on the planet and this is something that no one would think to deprive of any other people in the world. As such, BDS — the economic face of anti-Zionism — is an act of bias against Jews. And the term of art for such bias against Jews is anti-Semitism.

Sunday, November 29, 2015

It is the West’s tragedy that it doesn’t understand it is up against exactly the same Islamic death cult that has attacked the Jews in the Holy Land for almost a century.

Terrorist victim Ezra Schwartz.
(photo credit:Courtesy)

Melanie Phillips..
As I See It/JPost..
29 November '15..

The daily attacks on Jews in Israel and the disputed territories are continuing.

The toll of killings and injury from the three-month Palestinian-Arab terrorism and incitement campaign is mounting. At least 23 victims have lost their lives since the beginning of October in rock, gun, knife and car-ramming attacks.

In Tel Aviv, a Palestinian killed two Jews and wounded others in a knife attack at the entrance to a synagogue. In Gush Etzion in the West Bank, a Palestinian opened fire with a submachine gun on a group of people at a road junction killing 18-year-old American Ezra Schwartz, an Israeli man and a Palestinian passerby and wounding several others.

Near the same intersection 20-year-old Hadar Buchris from Safed was knifed to death.

Last Monday, two Palestinian girls ages 14 and 16 stabbed a 70-year-old Palestinian man with a pair of scissors in Jerusalem’s iconic Mahaneh Yehuda market; they mistook him for a Jew.

Many other attacks are taking place, with or without casualties. These Israeli terrorism victims are however almost invisible to the West, where the vast majority of attacks are not reported at all.

To some extent this is understandable.

Much worse has been going on elsewhere, not least in the heart of Europe itself. What is so disturbing is the way this sustained terrorism is being willfully airbrushed from the picture to which it belongs.

Last week, US Vice President Joe Biden described as “heinous” terrorist attacks in Paris, Beirut, Iraq and Nigeria. Israel was not included in his list of countries suffering from this scourge.

Biden was not alone. When people in the West think of terrorism, they don’t think of Israel as its victim. The reason is obvious.

Attacks on Israelis, whether by rocket or rock, are virtually never reported. That in turn is because the West thinks Israel is involved in a dispute over land boundaries for which it is partly or even wholly responsible.

And because the West also tells itself, erroneously, that “the Palestinian people” were the land’s original inhabitants, terrorism against Israelis becomes, outrageously, “resistance” – especially if the Israelis under attack are “settlers.”

Yet the current terrorism campaign against Israeli Jews is providing ample evidence of the real nature of the Arab war against the Jews. It was incited by PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his henchmen preaching Islamic holy war by spreading the inflammatory lie that Israel wants to take over or destroy al-Aksa mosque.

Abbas’s adviser on Islam, Mahmoud al-Habbash, said this month that Israel is “Satan’s project,” and that Jews represent “evil.”

A preacher in al-Aksa Mosque, Sheikh Khaled al-Mughrabi, raved: “The Children of Israel will all be exterminated, the Antichrist will be killed and the Muslims will live in comfort for a long time.”

Much of this terrorism campaign is being perpetrated, even more disgustingly, by young Palestinians taught from the cradle that their highest Islamic aspiration is to murder Jews and seize the whole of Israel.

It is being further encouraged, supported and promoted by the Palestinian leadership honoring and glorifying those who are murdering Israeli Jews.

...But for all the similarity in the economic impact of their actions, there’s one important difference between the knife-wielding Palestinians and the EU bureaucrats. The stabbers are overwhelmingly teenagers, and nobody seriously expects teenagers to think through the consequences of their actions. The EU bureaucrats, in contrast, are ostensibly responsible adults, who are supposed to know better.

Evelyn Gordon..
Analysis from Israel..
28 November '15..

EU bureaucrats won’t like the comparison, but in one significant respect, the officials who approved discriminatory labeling requirements for Israeli products earlier this month bear a marked resemblance to the Palestinians who have been knifing Jews throughout Israel for weeks now. Clearly, there’s no similarity between labeling requirements and murder; the two aren’t remotely comparable. But the underlying attitude is remarkably similar: Neither the EU bureaucrats nor the Palestinian stabbers seem to care how many Palestinians they hurt as long as they can hurt a few Jews in the process.

Both the stabbings and the labeling promise to wreak havoc on the Palestinian economy – or to be more specific, on the ability of thousands of Palestinians to support themselves and their children. With regard to the violence, this ought to be self-evident. In an article earlier this month, for instance, reporter Brett Kline described the despondent mood in tourism-dependent Bethlehem now that clashes between slingshot-wielding Palestinians and Israeli soldiers have driven the tourists away. But the angriest comment, Kline reported, came from Hamadah, a construction foreman working in the Betar Ilit settlement:

He has just been informed that following the attempted stabbing of a soldier at the entrance to the settlement by a 22-year-old mother of two from Husan village across the road, work has been suspended indefinitely. And residents of Husan, home to thriving construction material depots and auto repair shops, cannot leave the village.“What was she thinking,” he fumes, referring to the stabber. “Who the hell is she? … The woman is being fed in hospital. But how will I feed my family?

Indeed, the situation has gotten so bad that Palestinian businessmen in Hebron have begun trying to stop the violence on their own. And it could easily get worse. Last week, following a deadly attack in Tel Aviv perpetrated by a Palestinian who had just received a permit to work in Israel, the Israeli government suspended 1,200 other recently issued entry permits pending a security review. Should more permit-holders perpetrate attacks, Israel could eventually be driven to bar Palestinian laborers almost entirely, as it did during the second intifada. The impact on the Palestinian economy would be devastating: According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 92,000 Palestinians work in Israel (not including the settlements). That’s 13 percent of all employed Palestinians in the West Bank.

Yet the labeling requirement could prove almost as deadly for the West Bank economy, because for all the EU’s claims that it simply wants to “give consumers accurate information,” it’s obvious that the goal is to ultimately shut down Israeli businesses in the territories, either by making them unprofitable or simply by persuading owners that the new labeling rules are more hassle than relocating would be. Indeed, several companies have already reached that very conclusion in recent years, the most famous being SodaStream, which relocated from the West Bank to the Negev in September.

Israeli businesses in the territories, however, rely almost exclusively on Palestinian labor. Around 20,300 Palestinians are employed in the settlements, according to the PCBS; that’s almost 3 percent of the West Bank’s employed Palestinians. And other Palestinians work as suppliers to Israeli businesses. Thus every business closure or relocation throws hundreds of Palestinians out of work; the Israeli Foreign Ministry estimates that in total, 30,000 Palestinians could lose their jobs.

...There is no compromise. No coexistence. They will not yield. If anyone reading this seeks to assist those Arabs-who-refer-to-themselves-as-'Palestinians', liberate them from their terror mindset. Free them from their self-imposed occupation of death and murder.

“An occupation that has lasted for almost 50 years must end...Israel cannot maintain military control of another people indefinitely.”

Here is Richard Falk, the UN's Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories in 2012:

In the light of the General Assembly’s recognition of Palestine as a nonmember observer State in Assembly resolution 67/19 of 29 November 2012, it seems appropriate to refer to territory under Israeli occupation as “Palestine” rather than as “Occupied Palestinian Territories”. Such a shift in language also emphasizes the inadequacy of the international law framework available to address a condition of prolonged occupation that has now extended for more than 45 years.

Saturday, November 28, 2015

...The latest, most chilling development has to do with the age of the indoctrinated. If in the past, Palestinian children were exposed to the systematic perversions of truth and dissemination of hatred starting in kindergarten, now the Palestinian indoctrination mechanism is even recruiting babies. The Palestinian baby bestowed with the name "Knife of Jerusalem" -- his birth certificate and photo were posted on the official Fatah website – is not alone. Dozens of photos of babies and very young children holding knives that someone stuffed into their tiny hands have been littering social media sites, along with war slogans and other violent texts. The juxtaposition between their innocent, sweet faces and the knives and violent language is immensely disturbing.

Nadav Shragai..
Israel Hayom..
27 November '15..

Hatred is an acquired trait. The Palestinian children who have been taking to the streets and stabbing Jews in recent weeks were not born with it, but they are certainly bred to it. A thorough investigation of the texts and images that shape the minds, worldviews and reality of the average Palestinian child, starting in infancy and through to high school, is extremely depressing. Such an investigation can provide answers as to why the ages of Palestinian terrorists keep dropping.

According to data provided by the Shin Bet security agency, the average age of 80% of the terrorists in the current surge of violence has been 20. The terrorist who stabbed four Israelis in Kiryat Gat on Saturday was only 17. One of the attackers in Pisgat Ze'ev last month was only 12; an 11-year-old and a 14-year-old stabbed a security guard on the Jerusalem light rail this month; and the girls who stabbed a man with scissors at the Jerusalem Mahane Yehuda market this week were 14 and 16.

There are many fathers to the doctrine of hatred and incitement, starting with the Palestinian Authority's education system, through social media and the Internet, and ending with the general atmosphere cultivated by the Palestinian media and many of public officials and clergymen within Palestinian society. Twenty years ago, the Palestinians signed the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (commonly known as Oslo II), promising to "ensure that their respective educational systems contribute to the peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples and to peace in the entire region" and to "refrain from introduction of any motifs that could adversely affect the process of reconciliation."

But today, this historic text seems like a sad joke, at best. New and up-to-date research conducted by Palestinian Media Watch, the Center for Near East Policy Research, MEMRI and the Strategic Affairs Ministry attest to just how sad this joke really is.

The latest, most chilling development has to do with the age of the indoctrinated. If in the past, Palestinian children were exposed to the systematic perversions of truth and dissemination of hatred starting in kindergarten, now the Palestinian indoctrination mechanism is even recruiting babies. The Palestinian baby bestowed with the name "Knife of Jerusalem" -- his birth certificate and photo were posted on the official Fatah website – is not alone. Dozens of photos of babies and very young children holding knives that someone stuffed into their tiny hands have been littering social media sites, along with war slogans and other violent texts. The juxtaposition between their innocent, sweet faces and the knives and violent language is immensely disturbing.

This indoctrination in infancy is only the beginning. When they grow up, they are exposed to an entire doctrine in the Palestinian Authority's institutions and education system. The latest Palestinian Media Watch report, "Palestinian Authority Education -- A Recipe for Hate and Terror," was presented to the Knesset Education Committee but received very little media attention. It goes into great detail about the phenomenon.

In the 57-page report, Itamar Marcus and his colleagues detail how 25 schools in the Palestinian Authority are named after terrorists. One of those schools, in Bethlehem, is named after 17-year-old female suicide bomber Ayat Al-Akhras. Many girls see her as a role model, wearing shirts bearing her image.

Three additional schools (two of them in the Hebron area) are named after Dalal Mughrabi. In 1978, Mughrabi led the massacre of 37 civilians, among them 12 children, on a bus on the coastal highway. The official Palestinian Authority television network recently aired a program on the Dalal Mughrabi school in Gaza.

In the program, the students expressed their esteem for the terrorist. "Still our mothers give birth to thousands like Dalal," said one student. "And she still walks among us. I personally am proud to attend the Dalal Mughrabi School, which bears this pioneering name."

Friday, November 27, 2015

...Palestinianism is a death cult. If that statement is offensive to you, then kindly point me to the editorials or school curricula or cartoons or TV shows or music videos in Arabic that say that it is not a good idea to die while trying to murder Jews. I will happily retract and publish the articles that criticize a generation that glorifies death. But you won't easily find them, because the such ideas cannot be safely said in Palestinian society.

Elder of Ziyon..
25 November '15..

Today (Wednesday), we learned the details of the interrogation of an 11-year old boy who decided to stab Jews on a light rail train two weeks ago:

The 11-year-old, a sixth grader from Shuafat, is the youngest assailant arrested to date in the current upsurge of Palestinian terrorism. He is too young to face charges under current Israeli law; the 14-year-old is facing charges of attempted murder.In their interrogation, the two children said they carried out the attack as an act of revenge, without planning in advance and with no encouragement from any adults.“We travelled from Shuafat to Damascus Gate in order to stab a soldier but did not do it because the soldiers were in groups and we didn’t find one standing alone,” recalled the 11-year-old. “Then he told me ‘let’s do an attack together to revenge the death of Muhammad Ali.’ He opened his bag and showed me the knife. At Damascus Gate I bought a pair of scissors and then we boarded the light rail and looked for Jews to stab.”Two light rail security guards boarded the train, but the boys decided “not to stab them because there were two of them. Later on one of them got off and we immediately attacked the one that remained.”“I stabbed him in his head, my cousin stabbed him in his chest and stomach until the guard pushed me and fired three bullets in my stomach,” said the 11-year-old.The two cousins had decided they were ready to die as shahids, or martyrs, he said.

Any person with a the slightest sense of morality would be aghast at the words from this child.

I have yet to find a single article in Palestinian media that shows the slightest regret that they have raised a generation of children who literally want to die for a chance to kill a Jew.

Think about that. Not a single Palestinian adult is willing to publicly express anything negative about children being brainwashed to die.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

...Today on Malki’s birthday, please help us in our quest to educate others about terrorism in Israel. Remember her, remember her purity and kindness and remember Ahlam Tamimi, the Islamic terrorist who murdered her.

At a friend's birthday partyin Jerusalem on August 8, 2001. Malki was murdered the following day.

Frimet's blog appears online on the Times of Israel website today. Please consider sharing the link with your friends.

Today is my daughter Malki’s birthday. As in each of the past fifteen years, it will be marked with a visit to her grave. The one other time we go there is to mark the anniversary of the day she was murdered.

I have always insisted on using that word, jarring though it is. I never say that Malki died. Or that she was killed or perished or passed away. It is significant to remember that she was snatched from us in that manner. And it is crucial to specify that her murderer was not your garden-variety blood-thirsty psychopath, but rather an Islamist terrorist.

Nowadays, my husband and I feel especially compelled to publicize that last point. We and the rest of the world must be reminded – and in some cases convinced — of how Jewish terror victims are one with terror victims of other nationalities.

Sadly, this is not a given. Many, even some Jews, view our victims as the collateral damage of a territorial conflict only vaguely connected to the terror threat confronting the rest of the world. The inference, of course, is that unlike the victims in Paris last week, my child’s murder had an explanation, a justification. Implying that as Jews residing in Israel, we invited our tragedy upon ourselves.

Unfortunately, the task of rectifying this abominable misconception has fallen to the victims themselves.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

...This era has been called a historical inflection point. Humanity is poised at the edge of a chaotic descent into a new dark age. Or maybe not. Israel is on the “seam line” where the forces of Islam and the West are contending for control. What happens here will be of great import for the rest of the world, but we have to win the battle to survive by ourselves. If we do, they’ll thank us in the long run.

Yes, I admit it. I started out in life as a leftist. In 1982 I thought that we went too far in Lebanon; we should have stopped at the 40 km. line promised by Sharon. I was horrified by the Sabra/Shatila massacres, and participated with the other members of my kibbutz at a Peace Now demonstration in Tel Aviv, calling for the replacement of Begin’s government. I saw myself as ‘pro-peace’, unlike those ‘settlers’.

By the time Oslo was signed I was starting to have my doubts. Sure, only a two-state solution would bring peace, the settlement movement was made up of religious fanatics, but – Arafat? Would he really become ‘moderate’? At least, I thought, we were on the right track with Rabin rather than a dangerous right-winger.

During the 90s, I became aware that Arafat lied all the time, calling for jihad in Arabic while he talked about ‘peace’ in English. I also noticed that terrorism was increasing rather than decreasing (much later, my son was part of a force that entered PLO headquarters in eastern Jerusalem and found documentary evidence that Arafat was paying the terrorists to kill Jews).

In 2000 the dream of a two-state agreement with the Palestinian Arabs disintegrated in the explosions of the Second Intifada. By the time the intifada had been suppressed by Operation Defensive Shield, I realized that there would not be an agreement. But we had to separate from the Palestinians, didn’t we? I recall a conversation with one of my son’s friends. “We have to build a wall between us and the Arabs,” I said. “We can’t live together with them in places like Hevron.”

“Hevron?” he said. “Davka (especially) Hevron!” where Abraham bought land from Ephron to bury Sarah, and where the Jewish population was brutally murdered in 1929. Davka Hevron. I couldn’t answer him.

But Arik Sharon had a plan, called “disengagement.” We would build walls and unilaterally separate from the Arabs. “Separate,” not withdraw. It would be done from strength, not weakness. It would be our choice, not theirs. If they tried anything, we’d crush them.

In 2005 my son got married. All the cars in the wedding procession displayed orange banners in opposition to the destruction of the Gaza settlements and the expulsion of their Jewish residents. I felt bad for them, but Arik, “the bulldozer,” thought it was the right choice. If we couldn’t trust Arik, whom could we trust?

The Arabs, it turned out, didn’t see it the way Sharon did. They saw it as weakness, a surrender and a vindication of their terrorist tactics, proof that the intifada had been a success after all. An argument to continue the violent “resistance.”

Could Arik have made it work? I doubt it, but we didn’t find out because Arik had his ultimately fatal stroke and was replaced by the common criminal and uncommon traitor Ehud Olmert, the worst Prime Minister in the history of Israel, who bungled a war and tried to give the country away to Mahmoud Abbas. To our great good fortune, Abbas wouldn’t take it.

Several wars and countless terrorist murders later, I began to understand the spiritual dimension to the conflict. I saw that the biblical homeland of the Jewish people in Judea and Samaria was important for more than strategic military reasons. I understood, as Moshe Dayan in 1967 had not, that the Temple Mount was not just of historical importance to the Jewish people. Dayan’s decision to give control over it to the Muslim authorities, just like Sharon’s abandonment of Gush Katif, was seen by the Arabs not as a gesture of strength, but as a surrender. And just like the disengagement from Gaza, it exacerbated the conflict rather than calming it.

But I still clung to the idea that there could be partial solutions. Couldn’t we just annex Area C, where most of the settlements are, and leave the mass of hostile Arabs in Areas A and B? Couldn’t we somehow wall them off and promise to strike them hard if they fire rockets over the walls?

Thursday, November 26, 2015

...It may seem difficult to fathom, but the GSS counted a total of 602 attacks last month. Yes, you read that correctly: 602 attacks — stonings, firebombings and other assaults — just in the 31 days of October. That averages out to nearly 20 attacks a day, every day, over a one-month period. During that same interval, more Israelis were wounded than in all of 2014 or 2013. No nation in the world would tolerate such a situation, and neither should Israel....As Winston Churchill rightly noted, "It is no use saying, 'We are doing our best.' You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary." And what is necessary now is for Israel to protect itself and its people, b'Siyata d'Shmaya, and do whatever it takes to stop the daily onslaught of Palestinian violence.

Michael Freund..
Hamodia/Pundicity..
24 November '15..

The past few weeks in Israel have been among the most vexing and upsetting in recent memory. It seems that hardly a day goes by without a multiplicity of attacks, as the Palestinians continue to wage a campaign of terror and violence fueled by primal hatred.

As I write these words, a Jewish family in Tzfat is mourning their 21-year-old daughter, Hadar Buchris, who was brutally stabbed to death Sunday by a Palestinian in Gush Etzion. Buchris had recently returned from a trip abroad, and was on her way to study Torah at a religious women's seminary in Bat Ayin when her life was abruptly cut short.

Sadly, her family is not the only one in recent weeks to see their world come crashing down on them.

Enough already! It is time for this madness to end, and for Israel to undertake a comprehensive counterterrorism campaign to restore a basic sense of security to the nation's streets.

Since the beginning of October, the Palestinians have carried out 70 stabbing attacks, 10 shootings and 10 car rammings, all with the aim of murdering and maiming as many Jews as possible.

But even those statistics only tell part of the story.

Numbers are curious things. Sometimes they conceal more than they reveal, providing us with a cold and narrow glimpse of the truth while obscuring all the sentiment and emotion of the situation. And yet, on occasion, figures can also encapsulate a state of affairs, telling us much of what we need to know in a concise and formulaic manner. And this, I believe, is exactly one of those cases.

According to Israel's General Security Service (GSS), also known as the Shin Bet, October saw the greatest number of monthly terrorist attacks in Yerushalayim and Yehudah and Shomron in the past nine years.

It may seem difficult to fathom, but the GSS counted a total of 602 attacks last month. Yes, you read that correctly: 602 attacks — stonings, firebombings and other assaults — just in the 31 days of October. That averages out to nearly 20 attacks a day, every day, over a one-month period.

During that same interval, more Israelis were wounded than in all of 2014 or 2013.

No nation in the world would tolerate such a situation, and neither should Israel.

What these numbers tell us quite clearly is that Palestinian terror continues to strike at a breathtaking pace, and the measures adopted by the Israeli government have thus far failed to stem the tidal wave of violence.

This simply cannot continue.

The first thing Israel needs to do is to muzzle the daily incitement being spewed by the Palestinians, whether via newspapers, radio, television or social media. There is no reason that Palestinian news outlets, which foment violence, laud terrorists and create a hostile and threatening environment should be allowed to continue to function. Freedom of the press does not — and must not — include the freedom to instigate murder.

...These children didn't wake up with blood lust one morning out of the blue. It's the end-stage of a process that takes a huge, multi-dimensional effort, with education (school curriculum) and religion (the mosques) being the central components. It's a tragedy that so few serious reporters and their editors see the recounting of this process as core to the reporting of the current Arab-on-Israeli barbarism and to the ongoing child-abuse conducted by Palestinian Arab society at all its levels (including the most senior). It's hard not to see reporters and their editors as complicit in this process.

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
25 November '15..

On busy Jaffa Road in Jerusalem at the point where the city's main transit hub, the Central Bus Station, is located, a young Arab man was stopped yesterday (Tuesday) by the security guards who are stationed there to oversee the well-being of tens of thousands of locals and visitors who daily pass by or enter or exit the modern structure.

The young Arab was asked some urgent questions after a passer-by who noticed him walking along the light-rail tracks just opposite the station alerted them and said the fellow, aged (as we now know) 19, had been checking what appeared to be a knife concealed inside his coat. Knives inside coats are no longer a strange or rare thing here. They demand an instant response.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

...The first obligation of any government is to defend the safety of its people. While no security measure is foolproof, Israel must do whatever it can to make it harder for these individual acts of terror to take place. And Israel’s leaders must make it clear to the Palestinians that Jewish blood is not to be spilled with impunity.

After two months of incessant attacks on Israeli civilians that have taken a mounting toll of lives, Prime Minister Netanyahu announced on Monday that he would order steps to limit the ability of Palestinians to slaughter Jews. Separate bypass roads would be created for Jews in the West Bank that would separate traffic and make it harder for Palestinians terrorists to treat traffic jams at road junctions as a killing ground. Inspections of Palestinian cars on those roads will continue. To deter terrorists, the government will also revoke permission for family members of killers to work in Israel. In other words, the terror surge has not only accomplished nothing for the Palestinians but is leading to measures that will make their lives harder. Which means the Palestinian Authority, which has helped incite this madness in which their people have gone out to stab, shoot and firebomb any Jew they can get near, has gotten its wish.

Much like their Hamas rivals, who triggered the 50-day war with Israel by launching terror raids and then raining down thousands of rockets on Israeli cities, towns and villages, the PA is actually quite pleased with the results of its campaign of incitement.

The same international public opinion that has viewed the stabbing intifada with indifference will now quickly go into overdrive denouncing Netanyahu’s moves. We’ll hear a lot about “apartheid roads” — a term used in the New York Times story about the announcement. The checkpoints to stop potential terrorists will be termed a deliberate attempt to harrass and humiliate proud and peaceful Palestinians who only want a state of their own. The crimes of those Palestinians who use knives to kill any Jew in sight will be rationalized as the product of their frustration with the lack of peace and an understandable protest against the oppression of occupation.

Hamas deliberately sought to maximize the casualties suffered by the people of Gaza by stationing its rockets and fighters in the midst of built-up urban areas. Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah Party may complain about Israeli measures of self-defense, but they give the PA more talking points to further Israel’s isolation.

The stabbing intifada, just like the Hamas war of 2014, is yet another stark reminder that the blithe talk about Israel needing to make more concessions to give peace a chance is utter rubbish. The Palestinians have not only consistently rejected Jewish peace offers since before the creation of the State of Israel, they are again demonstrating they have no compunction about sacrificing the lives as well as the prosperity and the dignity of their people in order to keep fighting a pointless war to eradicate Israel—a war they can never win.

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

...It’s not often that one not particularly remarkable article could sum up everything that is wrong with the Middle East and the way Western liberals think about it, but the Rudoren piece does just that. So long as Palestinians get this kind of favorable coverage, it’s little wonder that they persist in their belief that sooner or later the West will hand them Israel on a silver platter.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
23 November '15..

Today (Monday), another Israeli was killed and two more were wounded in a stabbing attack at a gas station by a Palestinian terrorist. On Sunday, another Israeli, a 20-year-old woman, was stabbed at an intersection near where 18-year-old Ezra Schwartz from Sharon, Massachusetts was killed. That attack was one of three assaults by Palestinians on Jewish targets that took place that day in which Israelis defending themselves killed all of the terrorist assailants. How did the New York Times describe it in their initial report on the events of the day published on its website Sunday evening? The headline read as follows: “1 Israeli and 3 Palestinians Killed in the West Bank.” This was a classic example of moral equivalence in which Israeli victims are equated by mainstream media bias with terrorists.

By Monday that headline was changed to: “Israeli Woman and 3 Palestinian Attackers Killed in West Bank.” But before we give the Times too much credit for correcting the prejudice against Israel that was demonstrated in the initial headline, it’s important to note that the story was just as imbalanced as it devoted far more space to information about one of the attackers than the Israeli that was killed. But in spite of that tilt, it also contained some important information the demonstrated the way the “moderate” Palestinian Authority was encouraging violence. In other words, the story was everything that was wrong in the Middle East contained in one bad article.

The instinct to lump in together all those killed in the last two months as Palestinian terrorism surged into what is being called the “stabbing intifada” stems from a belief that what is happening is merely part of a “cycle of violence.” Seen in that way, there are no terrorists or victims, merely two sides that are equally to blame for the problem.

This ignores the fact that the conflict is driven by the Palestinian belief in the illegitimacy of Israel within any borders. That is something that has been made evident by their repeated rejections of peace offers that would have ended the Israeli presence on the West Bank and given them the independent state they say they want. Yet the Palestinians continue to seek out random Jews to kill on the streets and do it in the name of their desire to end an occupation that could have been finished long ago if they were not still obsessed with Israel’s destruction.

It was telling that the Times chose to highlight the death of one of the assailants, 16-year-old Ashrakat Quattanami. She is the daughter of an active member of Islamic Jihad, and Islamist terrorist organization that thinks Hamas is too moderate and is dedicated to the elimination of Israel and its Jewish population. However, the Times merely describe it as “militant group.”

The Times quoted her father at length:

“My daughter went to the Hawara checkpoint today to seek revenge in her own hands against the Israelis who have stolen our land and continue to kill innocent Palestinian people,” Mr. Qattanani, an imam at a neighborhood mosque, said in an interview. “Last night, she was very upset, and said, ‘If I become a martyr, give my organs to a Palestinian who needs them.’”

Mind you, there is no talk of statehood or of the West Bank. Rather merely a generic description of all Israelis as living on “stolen land.”

Yet the author of the piece, Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren, told us nothing about 20-year-old Hadar Buchris, the one Israeli fatality of the day, other than her name, her age and the fact that she was from Safed, a city inside the 1967 lines. Nor did we learn anything about the person Qattanani tried to kill.

But what was of interest was the fact that not just her father’s radical group is lionizing as a martyr and the slain stabber. The Palestinian Authority officially declared her death “a war crime.” She died when an Israeli in a car spotted her chasing an Israeli girl with a knife knocked her down. A soldier then shot her. But both PA leader Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah Party and Hamas now mark the quick-witted driver for death.

...opportune or not, Israel must replace the east Jerusalem curriculum if it wants to avoid future rounds of violence like the current one. It’s too late to do anything about the current generation of East Jerusalem Arabs; they’ve already been thoroughly indoctrinated to the view that Israel is evil incarnate. But it’s not too late to prevent the PA from brainwashing another generation of children.

Evelyn Gordon..
Analysis from Israel..
24 November '15..

In confronting the current onslaught of lone-wolf attacks, the tactics Israel has used successfully against terrorist organizations have so far proven ineffective. That begs the question of what it should be doing instead. I have no solutions for the short run, but there’s one obvious step Israel must take if it wishes to prevent attacks like these over the long run. That step emerges from two of the most salient features of the current violence: Permanent residents of Israel have committed a huge proportion of the attacks, but citizens of Israel have committed very few.

The permanent residents in question are mainly east Jerusalem Arabs, and they have committed more than eight times as many attacks as Arab citizens have, even though Arab citizens outnumber permanent residents by more than 4:1. This enormous gap certainly can’t be explained by the popular fallacy that terror is motivated mainly by economic concerns; as permanent residents, east Jerusalem Arabs enjoy the same access to jobs, the same freedom of movement throughout Israel and the same health and welfare benefits that citizens do. Granted, Arab citizens are generally better off, but the difference isn’t dramatic enough to explain the dramatic gap in terrorist activity.

There is, however, one difference quite dramatic enough to explain this gap: Whereas Arab citizens study the Israeli curriculum in school, most of East Jerusalem’s permanent residents study the Palestinian Authority curriculum. And that curriculum, as sweeping reports by both Palestinian Media Watch and IMPACT-SE have detailed, is filled with vile anti-Israel and anti-Semitic incitement.

Inter alia, as PMW’s report notes, this curriculum rejects the legitimacy of Israel’s existence (textbooks refer to “the so-called State of Israel”), justifies violence against it, defines such violence as a religious obligation and informs students that Jews and Zionists are irredeemably evil (one book, for instance, refers to “the robbing Jews”; another tells students that Israel “killed your children, split open your women’s bellies, held your revered elderly men by the beard, and led them to the death pits”). These messages are then reinforced by the “educational” programs broadcast on the PA’s official media, where Jews are described as “monkeys and pigs,” “enemies of Allah” and the “most evil of creations,” among other charming epithets.

East Jerusalem schools have been using the PA curriculum, with Israel’s consent, ever since the PA’s establishment in 1994. In other words, Israel decided two decades ago to let the PA indoctrinate a generation of East Jerusalem schoolchildren to abominate Israel – and now it’s shocked that the graduates of this indoctrination are going out and trying to murder Israelis.

The PA curriculum obviously isn’t the only problem; the PA also contributes to the climate of incitement that drives these attacks in many other ways, including statements by its senior officials, broadcasts by its official media organs and Facebook posts by its political parties. Nor can this incitement be excused as a response to despair over the frozen peace process: This is how the PA chose to “educate” its people even in the heyday of the Oslo process when most of the world believed peace was at hand.

...Those janitors should complain to the International Criminal Court that their basic human rights are being violated by the leaders of the American Anthropological Association, and those leaders should stand judgment at a modern version of Nuremberg, not for abstract speculation of which scholars are fond, but for practical harm they are causing to innocent and hard-working Israeli people.

Dr. Michael Curtis..
American Thinker..
24 November '15..

How horrible is it to be a mischievous and malignant hypocrite. In recent days in November 2015, religious and American academic groups have unabashedly illustrated that false face hides what the false heart knows.

On this seventieth anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials of the Nazi criminals, it is well to remember the words of Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor, on November 21, 1945. He spoke of the wrongs that have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. He urged prosecution of those Nazi leaders who had possessed great power, who used it to set evils in motion, and who terrified the world.

Some mainstream religious groups, the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches, are not as willing as was Jackson to label and name those responsible, those gangsters and militarists, in the modern world for racial hatreds, terrorism and violence, arrogance and cruelty of power.

The two religious groups have issued statements on the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015. Both of those statements, well-meaning in their usual fashion, suffer from refusal, hypocritical or not, to tell the whole truth. They do not identify the people and the ideology that committed evil.

The Executive Committee of the World Council of Churches on November 14, 2015 stated in English, French, and Arabic that “the people of Paris again confronted terror, violence and death, following attacks that left more 120 people dead and hundreds more injured.” The WCC articulated that its hearts and minds were with the victims, but was silent about who were the murderers. Surely the WCC does not really believe that aliens from outer space were responsible for the evil act of terror in Paris. Or does it, since the name of the Islamist terrorism by the Islamic State, ISIS, or that of any other group, is never mentioned?

Similarly, Jim Winkler, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, condemned the November 13 attacks. He urged, “these acts of horrific violence not be mistaken as part of a war between Christianity and Islam.” Mr. Winkler not only has forgotten the name of the perpetrators in Paris but also the events of history. The last Christian Crusade to defend Holy Places against Muslims ended in 1291 when the last city controlled by the Crusaders, the town of Acre, was captured by Muslim forces.

In this respect it is unfortunate that President Barack Obama on February 5, 2015 made an ill-advised moral comparison when speaking of “the terrible deeds in the name of Christ” committed during the Crusades and the Inquisition. Of course, Christians have committed terrible deeds in the past, but Obama’s emphasis on the atrocities of Christians can be seen as an example of moral equivalence between Christians and Muslims. The non-Muslim world has not declared war on Islam, but only on Islamist terrorism which has declared war on the civilized world, terrorism which the WCC and the NCC have difficulty in specifically condemning.

It is symptomatic of the political correctness, shameful ignorance and unsatisfactory nature of present day academics in American universities that they seem ignorant of, or dismiss as irrelevant, the existing menace to world civilization by Islamist terrorists and those responsible for the evils committed in Paris, Brussels, Beirut, and Mali, to take only the most recent. Instead, whether out of prejudice or bias, or as a result of weakly succumbing to unremitting Palestinian pressure organizations, some academics register indignation and urge action against what they see as the one, and only, violator of human rights in the universe, the State of Israel.

Apart from a lunatic Arab fringe element, no political or religious group has attributed the massacre of 130 people in Paris to instructions by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to citizens of the State of Israel or in particular to the ubiquitous Mossad that the fringe element regards as engrossed in plots of world conspiracy.

Certainly members of the American Anthropological Association do not believe this, or at least have not started it publicly. But they did, after three years of Palestinian organization and pressure, on November 20, 2015 at a meeting in Denver of 1,400 of its members, pass a resolution by 1040 to 36 calling for the boycott of Israeli academic institutions. A final vote on this resolution will be taken by all AAA 10,000 members at its annual meeting in April 2016.

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

...Happily, Israeli political parties inside and outside the government have united in their sharp criticism of labeling. Nevertheless, criticism alone has not been and will not be enough to stop labeling or further steps. However, the EU's inconsistent and discriminatory application of its rules gives Israel unique leverage to fight back. The labeling rules contradict not just the EU's treatment of other areas where they do not recognize a country's sovereignty; they contradict official EU statements of policy and European court rulings.

Prof. Eugene Kontorovich..
Israel Hayom..
24 November '15..

The European Commission's labeling is not about promoting "the two state solution" and it's not about "consumer protection." It is about a single-minded demonization of Israel.

The EU claims that "Made in Israel" labels mislead consumers about products' "country of origin." Yet the EU is not merely seeking a different geographical designation. Surprisingly, according to the EU rules, if "Made in Israel" is the problem, then "Made in the West Bank" or even "Made in Occupied Palestinian Territories" is not an acceptable answer.

Indeed, the EU notice specifically says that such alternative geographic indications cannot be used, though they entirely address the objection about geographic/territorial mislabeling. Instead, the EU notice also requires such products also be labeled "Israeli settlement" products. This is an extraordinary and unique step. "True origin" requirements for labeling are always and only about the country or territory goods comes from.

"Israeli settlement" labeling, however, is not about the geographic area. "Israeli settlement" is not a place on the map. The EU has replaced geographic indications -- labels about where something was made -- to something labels about who or how goods were made.

The rules leave room for creativity and challenge by Israel exporters. Nothing in the EU rule proscribes a "Judea and Samaria" label. Such a designation satisfies all the EU's objections: It does not say "Israel," and is a geographic place name. Of course, the EU does not like "Judea" and "Samaria," because that is what "settlers" call them. But then it is also the best way to accurately inform consumers that the products are from settlements.

The labeling is another step in a series of escalating European punitive measures. Europe has issued guidelines barring a single euro being spent on academic or other projects in Judea and Samaria or the Golan; barred the import of some agricultural products; issued vague warnings to businesses about having any connection with "settlements," and now, imposed labeling. That is just the past two years.

The EU is literally working down a list, one that ends in ruinous sanctions. Indeed, Europe uses Israel's failure to lodge formal legal protests to the act measure as a precedent for taking the next step.

...Today's three dead 16 year olds join the long list of Palestinian Arab lives - many of them the lives of children - thrown away for nothing other than to serve the vanity, greed and weakness of this 80 year old hateful, bigoted fraud.

The Arabic news site, Alquds, says today this
photo shows the site of the attempted stabbing
[Image Source]

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
23 November '15..

This post is about a low-profile terror attack today (Monday) that has gotten almost no news coverage: also about little examined matters like where the terrorists come from, how they got there and who sent them. They're serious existential questions.

An Arab attempted a stabbing attack in the Hatmar Junction (also known as the Territorial Brigade junction - ed.) in Samaria on Monday afternoon, close to 3:00 pm. The stabber was eliminated by IDF soldiers at the scene before he was able to harm anyone.

This is the same checkpoint where another terror attack was done just yesterday. As Israel National News reported that, a little after 9 am Sunday a Palestinian Arab woman launched a stabbing assault on Israeli pedestrians in a place the article calls Brigade Square in the Samaria district. She failed to inflict any injuries on anyone. The attempt itself came to an end when a vehicle driven by a former head of the Samaria Regional Council deliberately plowed into her in order to thwart her obvious intentions, immediately after which IDF soldiers on duty at the site, acting on the relatively-new "shoot-to-kill-terror-attackers-in-the-act shot and killed her in the act.

Today's attack is reported in the Arab media with a few more details.

This version comes from International Middle East Media Center, self-described as "a joint Palestinian-International effort [that] combines Palestinian journalists' deep understanding of the context, history, and the socio-political environment with International journalists' skills in non-partisan reporting." It got started in 2003. Just how non-partisan is something we can discuss.

Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian teenager on Monday afternoon after he allegedly attempted to stab an Israeli soldier at the Huwwara checkpoint south of Nablus, Israel's army said. An Israeli army spokesperson said that as the Palestinian approached the checkpoint, he "drew a knife and attempted to attack a soldier." She said that the soldier "responded to the immediate danger" and opened fire on the Palestinian, "resulting in his death." The Palestinian Ministry of Health identified the alleged attacker to Ma'an News Agency as Alaa Khalil Sabah Hashah, 16.

If they're right, this makes the hapless attacker at Huwwara Checkpoint the third Palestinian Arab 16 year-old child (yes, child) to be killed in the same day, today, while carrying out an attack on Israelis with a knife in his hand. We posted about the other two here and here.

Not for the first time, we ask ourselves and our readers how a society engineers things such that it produces children of 16 and less ready to kill and be killed in an undeclared war. Conveniently, one part of the answer popped up today via Twitter:

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter.

...Earlier this month, for instance, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen argued that in the wake of the terror attacks in Paris, the West must eliminate ISIS’s “stronghold in Syria and Iraq,” because terrorists “cannot be allowed any longer to control territory on which they are able to organize, finance, direct and plan their savagery.”...Yet this basic truth is no less true for Palestinian terrorists, and it was inscribed on Israeli hearts in blood during the second intifada: Denying terrorists a territorial base won’t eliminate terror, but granting them a territorial base will ensure the terror escalates by orders of magnitude. Thus bad as the current situation is for Israel, the alternative of a Palestinian state would be much, much worse.

I’ve been slowly wading through the 106-page magazine Haaretz put out in honor of its Israel Conference on Peace earlier this month. It contains articles by 50 Israeli, Palestinian and Western contributors, most of whom recite the same talking points veteran peace processors have used for years. But one new argument that has cropped up repeatedly underscores the degree to which the “peace industry” completely disregards historical fact: the claim that the recent wave of Palestinian attacks “proves” a Palestinian state is necessary for Israel’s security. The truth is that for all the horror of the current violence, a simple comparison with the second intifada shows that Israel suffered far more when Palestinians actually controlled their own territory.

Over the last 53 days, Palestinians have killed 20 Israelis and wounded 182. If this pace continued for a year, the number of fatalities would total 138, one of the highest annual death tolls due to terror in Israel’s history. So it’s understandable that people might think things could hardly be worse – until you consider that this projected annual total is roughly equivalent to the number of Israelis killed during a single month of the second intifada (March 2002, with 134 dead).

Altogether, Palestinians killed 452 Israelis in the worst year of that intifada (2002), along with over 200 in both the preceding and following years; thousands of other Israelis were wounded. And there’s one major reason why the death toll then was so much higher than it is now: Sizable chunks of the West Bank were under full Palestinian control as a result of the Oslo Accords. Israeli troops never entered those areas, which consequently served as safe havens where terrorist groups could plan and train for attacks, build bombs and do all the other work necessary to prepare the kind of mass-casualty attacks that were the second intifada’s hallmark.

That’s why the death toll began dropping dramatically once the Israel Defense Forces reasserted control over these areas in mid-2002: The security services spent the next several years systematically collecting intelligence about terrorist organizations and using it to degrade their capabilities, with the result that Israeli fatalities dropped by around 50 percent a year in each of the next five years – from 452 in 2002 to 208 in 2003, 117 in 2004, 56 in 2005, 30 in 2006 and 13 in 2007. And that’s also why the current violence hasn’t included any mass-casualty attacks: Since the IDF still controls the West Bank, it has been able to thwart terrorist organizations’ efforts to perpetrate them.

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About Me

I visited Hevron in November 2000 after the outbreak of the Rosh Hashanah War to see what could be done to assist in the face of the growing daily attacks on the community. After returning to work for the community in the summer of 2001, a bond and a love was forged that grows to this day. My wife Melody and I merited to be married at Ma'arat HaMachpela and now host visitors from throughout the world every Shabbat as well as during the week. Our goal, "Time to come Home!"